This issue of JOT marks a number of changes in the goals, process, appearance and format of the Journal of Object Technology.
The object-oriented research community needs a strong archival journal commanding the right level of scientific respect. JOT, the Journal of Object Technology, published by Bertrand Meyer at ETH and edited by Richard Wiener since 2002, is the spiritual successor to JOOP, the Journal of Object-Oriented Programming. JOT has combined aspects of a traditional scientific journal with scientific-magazine-style features such as columns. In the absence of any other reference publication in the field, a group of researchers including Bertrand Meyer and myself has taken the initiative to devise a new, expanded formula for JOT, which will emphasize the research orientation and instill high standards of refereeing, while retaining some of the industry-oriented features that have sustained the success of JOT over the past eight years.
Periodic and regular rotation of staff is important to keep a volunteer organization healthy. Accordingly, this issue of JOT introduces a new editorial board, mandated to establish the highest scientific quality for JOT research contributions by actively soliciting strong submissions and by applying rigorous review standards to submitted papers. Terms for associate editors and the editor-in-chief are normally two years, renewable once. A separate steering committee now oversees the editorial process and all other strategic and management decisions.
The JOT submission and review process has been thoroughly revised to ensure full transparency, high standards of refereeing, and rapid turnaround. Papers judged to be within scope will normally be reviewed by three expert referees, and a final decision should be given within 3 months. During 2010, JOT will be emptying its pipeline of accepted papers so that, starting January 2011, papers will be published as soon as the final camera-ready version is available. In a change with JOT’s former policy, authors will retain their copyright, instead signing a simplified copyright agreement. JOT also plans to introduce Digital Object Identifiers for all accepted research contributions. AITO (Association Internationale pour les Technologies Objets) has agreed to sponsor JOT, thus guaranteeing the future of the web site and the digital object identifiers.
The JOT format will be modified to clearly distinguish peer-reviewed research contributions from reviews, columns, and other non-research contributions. Instead of publishing all contributions in both HTML and PDF, research contributions will be published only in a newly-design PDF format, suitable for printing as well as on-line viewing, whereas non-research contributions will appear exclusively on-line. In additional to regular research papers, JOT will also explicitly welcome state-of-the-art surveys and tutorials for emerging research fields. These contributions will undergo the usual peer-review process for research contributions.
The JOT web site has also been completely redesigned to be generated from metadata describing individual articles. This strategy eliminates the need for manual authoring of web pages for articles and issues, thus reducing the potential for errors while facilitating the gradual integration of new features into the web site, such as the automatic generation of BiBTeX entries for published articles. A separate WordPress blog is also being introduced with this issue, to host all non-research contributions (such as this editorial) and JOT announcements. Postings will automatically appear in the JOT RSS and Twitter feeds, thus providing more modern mechanisms to notify subscribers of new content and offering more convenient means to offer timely feedback.
I believe that JOT is well placed to establish itself as a unique open-access archival journal dedicated to all aspects of object technology, but we need your help and contributions to achieve this. An important milestone will be to have JOT listed in the best known indexes, such as the ISI Web of Science, but the selection process can be time-consuming. JOT can only establish itself as an “A” journal through a concerted community effort.
There are several things you can do to help. First, subscribe to JOT (by email, RSS or Twitter) and spread the word. Second, cite JOT publications in your work. Third, contribute full or expanded versions of your best research results to JOT, and encourage colleagues to do the same. We especially welcome expanded versions of high quality conference and workshop contributions. Finally, we also welcome timely and topical non-research contributions to the JOT blog to raise JOT’s visibility.
Oscar Nierstrasz
As the first “new” issue of JOT has just hit the stands, I thought I’d make some comments.
For over 10 years, I’ve been reading material – books, magazine articles, blogs, forums – on a hand-held device. JOT has always been a problem; I believe I was “scraping” the site for a while, but this ended up being a bit too much work, and over time, just stopped. I’ve not needed to “scrape” any sites to get material to my reading device for years.
With the changes to JOT announced, I was hoping I could add JOT back to the list of things I can read on my pocket device. I didn’t read this blog post carefully enough though.
Two major issues: PDF only for “research contributions”. and not having a feed for the articles.
re: PDF
PDF is a problem because it doesn’t provide a great reading environment for small devices. Programs like GoodReader for the iPhone provide as good a reading environment as you can possibly get for PDFs, but it can only do so much. A sample JOT article downloaded into GoodReader only displays well in landscape mode, and requires the usual resizing/adjusting/vertical locking that most PDFs do. Frankly, a pain in the ass.
Also, it appears that the articles are only available in PDFs singly, which means I would need to download each one by hand to the device. More pain.
It also seems confusing to have some content in HTML and some content in PDF.
re: feed
A feed is something I asked a previous editor about years ago. A perfect story for me would be to have all of the content published available in the feed. But it appears the “research contributions” aren’t published in the feed, which is avenue of publishing the “non-research contributions”.
I find this distinction between “research” and “non-research” contributions to be odd. Presumably, if I follow you on Twitter and in a feed reader, I’m going to see all the non-research contributions, and will be able to easily read them on a hand-held device. And for all the research contributions, I won’t be notified when they’re available, nor will I be able to read them on my device. Fail.
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It seems pretty obvious to me that you should publish ALL of your material as HTML, and all contributions should have a feed entry associated with them. If you want to distinguish “research” and “non-research” contributions, do it textually, not via your distribution mechanism. The HTML does not need to be fancy; in fact, it would be nice to have it as simple as possible.
In lieu of getting the articles published in a regular manner, perhaps you could look into just making it easier to consume the “research” contributions on a hand-held device. Which, in the end, is all I really want. This could be as easy as combining all the PDFs into a single PDF file, formatted in such a way as to be readable on a small device – eg, reduce the ENORMOUS whitespace, and use larger fonts.
In the end, sort of feels like the new JOT has stepped fully out of the 1980’s, right into the 1990’s. Very similar to Wired’s recent attempt at producing a version of their magazine for the iPad. Close, but no cigar.
Comment by Patrick Mueller — 2010/07/07 @ 14:57
It would be interesting to have a possibility to comment on articles. What is even more useful, is the possibility to vote and evaluate articles using the same dimensions as reviewers (presentation, innovation etc.)
Comment by Alexandr Savinov — 2010/07/08 @ 10:05